Step aside New York Times: Honi’s “best” books of the 21st century

It is 2024, and the New York Times Book Review has published their list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. They compiled the list by asking famed writers to provide a list of their favourite books. In the weeks following, book critics castigated the list for its cronyism and elitism, supporting a small coterie of high-status writers. But do the most-lauded writers pen the best books? And where is the literature from marginalised voices?

Enter Honi Soit, in our navel-gazing attempt to rectify the New York Times’ nepotistic crimes. Honi has endeavoured to select books — fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry collections — that have left an imprint on our reading. Not all are perfect but all remain memorable. We haven’t ranked the books, because who are we to do so, but all ten of us have provided a slice of praise for our favourite work. Is our list any more expansive and anti-establishmentarian? You can put us to the test…

The 21st century is only dawning on us, and there will be plenty more stories and voices to come. Search out for them — and not just the loudest.

Our 10 picks…

Are we there yet? A journey around Australia — Alison Lester

This beautiful book will be familiar to anyone who lived their early childhood in the Australia of the 2000s. All wrapped up in humorous prose and exquisite illustration, I have yet to see a better representation of the Australian travel experience. The way Lester perfectly captures the wistful, eerie beauty of the Flinders Ranges is especially notable but the book has too many highlights to list. Anyone who knows me will describe my passion for travelling our continent; I can tell you that this book sparked that love. I have no doubt that any children I might have will read this book. It is indelibly special and worth revisiting as an adult. (Aidan Elwig Pollock)

Americanah (2013) — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Having read this book shortly after my first break-up, I felt that I could finally articulate all of the hardest — and most brilliant — memories I was holding onto. Centred on the love between strong-spirited Ifemelu and her teenage boyfriend Obinze, this story follows both protagonists as they immigrate, learn and change between Nigeria, England and the US. Ambitious in its use of flashbacks and refreshing in its portrayal of 2010s-blog-posting, Americanah is one of the most moving tableaus of race, gender, culture, migration and politics from this century. (Simone Maddison)

An Unnecessary Woman (2014) — Rabih Alameddine 

I was reading Alba Donati’s memoir Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop (2022) and she spent a paragraph recommending this book. It follows a 72-year-old woman who has spent much of her life translating Western novels into Arabic but never publishing them. The novel oscillates between her recounting life experiences, discussing her love of reading and her knowledge of seminal texts. I was drawn to the novel because it’s set in Beirut, even if it, like most contemporary Lebanese literature, is concentrated with depictions of the civil war. One look at Alammeddine’s bibliography and you will find a very skilled author who respects each of his characters, while writing such impactful prose. I love that the choice to live in solitude is not diminished nor makes you feel constrained as a reader. And who can claim to liken a city to Elizabeth Taylor and make it work? (Valerie Chidiac)

The Library Book (2018) — Susan Orlean

Student journalists, book lovers and library devotees, feast your eyes! This book is a masterclass in long-form investigation, as we accompany seasoned journalist Susan Orlean as she probes into the who, what, when, where and why of the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. With illustrious prose and razor-sharp intuition, Orlean serves up a delicious platter of truths, suspicions and fictions. Her years of research illuminate new angles of the mystery, and also develop the key characters such that they hang in the background of your mind. The book’s subject matter is both esoteric and thrilling, making the book unputdownable, which remains a rarity for non-fiction. I would read it again, and again, and again, without boredom creeping in. (Ariana Haghighi)

Shifting the Silence (2020) —  Etel Adnan

I was sceptical about prose poetry until I read this work by Etel Adnan. Her meditations on ageing and introspection sway between reality and mythology — she revels in her own convictions bending, expanding, and mutating within the form. Adnan grips the reader by the wrist, petitioning them to keep up with the pace of her poetry… The interruptions of thought, and the strobe-like imposition of her imagery. She interlaces the aesthetics of poetic scenery and the rhetoric of soliloquy. (Amelia Raines)

Three Stories (2014) — J.M.Coetzee

When I lost my joie for reading earlier in the year I was recommended I read Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. A striking voice for the post-apartheid South African landscape, I immediately took to his sobering and at-times uncomfortable writing style. Exploring his oeuvre I then found Three Stories, a captivating trilogy of short stories about a connection to a house, wheat threshing and Coetzee’s writer experience. The third story is in fact Coetzee’s Nobel recipient speech which provided an intimate rumination on the many transitional phases in his world. Whilst Disgrace holds an undeniable spot in the broader contemporary canon I chose Three Stories because it serves as a refreshing and inspiring meditation on a “double self”. So if you have lost your joie, here is my recommendation to you. (Zeina Khochaiche)

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) — Shankari Chandran

Set in Western Sydney, Chandran’s book tells the story of a culture war surrounding a Sri Lankan owned aged care home. The novel has multiple layers, simultaneously recounting the families’ experiences as academics during the Sri Lankan Civil War while also painting a vivid picture of the heavily racialised local politics of Sydney. We meet migrant aged care workers with PhDs and go inside the allegedly drab meeting rooms of councils to find out how the sausage is made. Chandran’s novel captures modern Australia because the message lacks clarity. Australia is revealed to have a harsh racist underbelly yet the culture war started over a Western Sydney nursing home ends up also highlighting the resilience of multicultural communities. (Angus McGregor)

Multiple Choice (2014) — Alejandro Zambra

What do stories, university entrance exams and multiple choice questions have in common? This book! Following the structure of Chile’s Academic Aptitude Test, Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice contains stories within stories within 90 multiple-choice questions. I was first recommended this book by a friend in Year 12, at a time when reading felt like a chore and I was slightly too fixated on Chilean history. Multiple Choice was unlike anything I had read before. A strange blend of history, legacy, nostalgia and satire, it feels like it shouldn’t work but somehow it does.

If you enjoy 

1. Word-plays
2. Double meanings
3. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style endings

then this is a book for you.

(Sandra Kallarakkal)

By Night In Chile (2000) — Roberto Bolaño

While you could easily classify this short work as firmly grounded in the 20th century, those duds at the NYT threw The Savage Detectives into their list, and that wasn’t even written in this century. While Bolaño grapples with heavy, ugly political realities in By Night in Chile, it feels as if this novella operates largely on a spiritual level, tearing apart the intricate interior defences and safeguards of Father Urrutia Lacroix, exploring guilt and cowardice at a level so intimate we begin to feel for such a vile protagonist. Few works feel so rooted in the past yet aware of the future to come: “And then the storm of shit begins.” (Huw Bradshaw)

Bad Art Mother (2022) — Edwina Preston

Ironically, my mum bought this for me after I picked it up at Harry Hartog’s in Marrickville. The pages were weighty and glossy, and I was intrigued. I read it quite quickly and enjoyed it immensely. My Goodreads review stated, “so good…20th century melbourne, feminism, poetry, art, Italian food, letters. I <3 literary women’s rage!”. The epistolary form feels intimate, allowing you into the imagined lives of a Melbourne woman poet and her son in the 1950s-1960s. Talking about the Melbourne artistic scene and its contradictions, the book flattens the past and loops it in with the future. (Victoria Gillespie)

The remaining 90 books….

Read for emotional death

• In the Dream House (2019) — Carmen Maria Machado
• Against the Loveless World (2019) — Susan Abulhawa
• Honor (2022) — Thrity Umrigar
• The Girl in the Green Dress (2022) – Jeni Haynes
• Insomniac City: New York, Oliver and Me (2017) — Bill Hayes
• Songs for the Dead and the Living (2023) — Sara M. Saleh 
• Bright Dead Things (2015) — Ada Limon 
• You Could Make This Place Beautiful (2023) — Maggie Smith
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) — Ocean Vuong
• Tidelines (2024) — Sarah Sasson
• Rapture (2005) — Carol Ann Duffy
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) — Joan Didion
• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011) — Jeanette Winterson
• Cold Enough for Snow (2022) –– Jessica Au
• Arsonists City (2021) — Hala Alyan
• Bluets (2009) — Maggie Nelson
• Nightcrawling (2022) — Leila Mottley
• Inside My Mother (2013) — Ali Cobby Eckermann

Read to learn 

• Peripathetic (2024) — Cher Tan
• The Mars Room (2018) — Rachel Kushner
• Black Butterflies (2022) — Priscilla Morris
• The Palestine Laboratory: how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world (2023) — Antony Loewenstein 
• Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance (2023) — Eda Gunaydin
• Azadi (2020) — Arundhati Roy
• I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2012) — Mourid Barghouti
• What the Colonists Never Knew: a History of Aboriginal Sydney (2020) — Dennis Foley, Peter Read
• Maoism: A global history (2019) — Julia Lovell
• The Drone Eats with Me (2015) — Atef Abu Saif
• The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World (2018) — Sarah Weinman
• Translating Myself and Others (2022) — Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Twilight Zone (2016) — Nona Fernandez
• Tell Them I Said No (2017) –– Martin Herbert
• Growing Up in Australia (2021) — Various authors
• Men Explain Things to Me (2014) – Rebecca Solnit
• Minor Detail (2017) — Adania Shibli
• The Refugees (2017) — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Read for a warmed heart

• Gentle and Fierce (2021) — Vanessa Berry
• Unconditional Love: A Memoir of Filmmaking and Motherhood (2019) — Jocelyn Moorhouse
• When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017) — Chen Chen 
• The Argonauts (2015) — Maggie Nelson
• Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024) — Salman Rushdie 
• The Thirty Names of Night (2020) —- Zeyn Joukhadar 
• DallerGut Dream Department Store: the dream you ordered (2019) — Miye Lee
• Bound to Happen (2023) — Jonathan Shannon 
• Station Eleven (2014) — Emily St. John Mandel
• Time Shelter (2020) — Georgi Gospodinov
• What you are looking for is in the library (2023) — Michiko Aoyama
• The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) — Trenton Lee Stewart
• The Sense of an Ending (2011) — Julian Barnes
• On Animals (2021) — Susan Orlean
• Convenience Store Woman (2016) — Sayaka Murata
• Dirt Poor Islanders (2024) — Winnie Dunn
• The Swan Book (2013) — Alexis Wright
• Ruby Redford Look Into My Eyes (2011) — Lauren Child 

Read to escape

• The Eyes Are The Best Part (2024) — Monica Kim
• Losing Face (2021) — George Haddad 
• Paradise Estate (2023) — Max Easton
• Victory City (2023) — Salman Rushdie 
• Priestdaddy (2017) — Patricia Lockwood
• Mirror Sydney (2017) — Vanessa Berry 
• Severance (2018) –– Ling Ma
• Portable Curiosities (2016) — Julie Koh
• Roman Stories (2023) — Jhumpa Lahiri
• Laurinda (2014) — Alice Pung
• This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fictions (2022) — ed. Mykaula Saunders 
• Populate and Perish (2016) — George Haddad
• The Palace of Illusions (2008) — Chitra Banerjee Divakurni
• Whereabouts (2021) — Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Inheritance of Loss (2006) — Kiran Desai
• Walking on the ceiling (2019) — Ayşegül Savaş
• Lola in the Mirror (2023) — Trent Dalton

Read for the style 

• The Testament of Mary (2012) — Colm Tóibín
• 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019) — Elif Shafak
• Dropbear (2021) — Evelyn Araluen 
• All That’s Left Unsaid (2022) — Tracey Lien
• The House of Youssef (2019) — Yumna Kassab
• Are You My Mother? (2012) — Alison Bechdel
• Exit West (2017) — Mohsin Hamid
• Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) — Ahmed Saadawi
• Girl, Woman, Other (2019) — Bernadine Evaristo 
• Liveblog (2015) — Megan Boyle
• The Gypsy Goddess (2014) — Meena Kandasamy
• Silence is a Sense (2021) — Layla AlAmmar
• Alphabetical Diaries (2024) — Sheila Heti
• Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) — Billy Collins
• Crush (2004) – Richard Siken
• Embroideries (2003) — Marjane Satrapi
• De Niro’s Game (2006) — Rawi Hage
• As Good a Woman as Ever Broke Bread (2021) — Alex McInnis